Palo Alto (CA) – Silicon Valley startup Tilera today announced the Tile64, a processor with 64 programmable cores that, according to the company, houses ten times the performance and 30 times the power efficiency of Intel's dual-core Xeon processors.

Industry sources confirmed to TG Daily that Intel has received first silicon of its "Tylersburg" chipset, which will be available for high-end desktop processors built on Intel's new Nehalem architecture due in 2008.

AMD announced an initiative today designed to help developers accelerate their software: There will be a new classification of hardware extensions dubbed XSP (or Extensions for Software Parallelism), which provides internal hardware monitors that contain runtime observed information about executing processes. This new data is expected to help software re-design itself at run-time to remove conditions that are known to be significant bottlenecks to high performance.

Intel today officially announced the Xeon X5365 – a quad-core processor that so far only has been available in limited quantities. The company also quietly announced that it has begun phasing out all remaining Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors.

Cupertino (CA) - Apple has received a patent for a touchpad that basically extends for the entire length of a notebook computer, adding to a series of related patents expected to make their way to future MacBooks.As the patent notes, most laptop computers have a very small touchpad so the surrounding area of empty space can be used to rest the user's palms. The new idea from Apple would be to have this empty space filled with a much wider touchpad.

We continue with part 2 our 3-part series on virtualization. In this installment, we look at applications, benefits and challenges. We will discuss server farms, ISPs and businesses that have made virtualization a key component of their strategy. And we will look at end-user applications and the reasons why an individual might choose virtualization for their desktop.